EDITORIAL: No more excuses on Boat Harbour

Andrea Paul, chief of the Pictou Landing First Naiton, and Environment Minister Randy Delorey signed an agreement Monday that will see the eventual closure of the Boat Harbour effluent treatment plant. (FRANCIS CAMPBELL / Truro Bureau)

A crisis has been averted at Boat Harbour. But a cleanup solution has yet to be found.

That’s the gist of the deal reached by Pictou Landing Chief Andrea Paul and Environment Minister Randy Delorey to address the province’s longstanding failure to remediate the pulp-waste lagoon it located next to the First Nation’s land nearly 50 years ago.

For its part, the government is making a new commitment to devise a plan to relocate the effluent treatment facility and to remediate the Boat Harbour lagoon.

This time, the promise will be backed by legislation to be introduced by next June.

In return, the Pictou Landing First Nation ended a blockade that prevented the repair of a pipe that brings effluent from the Abercrombie Point pulp mill to Boat Harbour. The mill has not been able to operate since a break in the pipe was discovered last week.

Signing the agreement was a demonstration of tremendous patience by the Pictou Landing Mi’kmaq.

Since the late 1990s, provincial governments of all stripes have failed to keep promises to close and clean up the waste lagoon, created by the province to serve the mill built by Scott Paper in 1967.

That failure stung Pictou Landing all the more when those governments managed to find millions of dollars to assist the five owners the mill has had since 1995.

Chief Paul and her community are now extending their trust one more time. They’re allowing the mill to re-open and operate while the province works out where to relocate the treatment plant, how Boat Harbour will be cleaned up, how long it will take and at what cost.

Given the history, that’s a true act of forbearance by the Pictou Landing First Nation and deserves great respect.

It’s now up to the current government to earn the trust that has been placed in it by producing a timely and credible cleanup plan. As Mr. Delorey rightly acknowledged, “tangible action” is what will really make a difference.

In that sense, taking a year to produce a concrete, cost-ed, detailed plan is far more credible than the blanket assurances with no plan that we’ve heard before.

In 1995, for example, Liberal Supply and Services Minister Gerald O’Malley said a deal with Kimberly-Clark, which then owned the mill, “asbolutely” ensured the treatment facility would be moved and the lagoon closed by 2005.

But that timeline was later extended. And by 2005, the mill had been spun off by Kimberly-Clark to Neenah Paper, which sold it in 2008 to a hedge-fund venture, Northern Pulp, which was bought by Paper Excellence Canada Holdings in 2011. In 2008, Rodney MacDonald’s Conservative government made another cleanup commitment that Darrell Dexter’s NDP government then ignored.

Meanwhile, the cost of a fix has climbed. The 1995 estimate of $40 million to $50 million for a new facility and $5 million to $6 million for remediation has doubled in recent forecasts.

The many changes in mill ownership and the uncertainty in the pulp industry have not made planning an investment of this sort easy. But it’s as essential to the future of the mill as other upgrades Ottawa and the province have funded. And the Pictou Landing Mi’kmaq cannot in good conscience be asked to accept any more excuses.